Principals

Patient Privacy

Bluebird uses state of the art privacy safeguards. Patient confidentiality has been the cornerstone of our business for more than 15 years. From the very beginning, and long before this issue became recognized as critical, we designed Bluebird to meticulously protect a patient's clinical information.

Intelligent Medical Systems is committed to the responsible management of personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and Australian Privacy Principles (APP's). These principles are legally binding and the cornerstone to the framework for the protection of information privacy, prescribing how, as an organisation, we handle personal information across its lifecycle, including its collection, use, disclosure and storage. Intelligent Medical systems takes all reasonable steps to keep the personal information secure and to protect it from misuse, interference and loss as well as from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. This Privacy Policy Statement describes how Intelligent Medical Systems manage personal information.

Individual Patient Safety

HAI and antibiotic stewardship have become sentinel indicators of the quality and safety of patient care. Bluebird was specifically designed to improve individual patient safety. Only when attending doctors understand that an infection control program benefits their individual patient/s, can you be certain that they will support that program. An infection control program without frontline support is unlikely to succeed.The appropriate use of antimicrobials is considered an essential part of patient safety. Real time information is essential for individual patient safety. To manage, one needs to measure, to manage antimicrobial stewardship effectively, one needs to measure, in real time, with immediate feedback to the prescribing doctor

Quality Improvement

Bluebird encourages effective, structured, quality improvement methodology. In particular, interrupted time sequence run charts allow comparison before and after specific interventions. We recommend that the antimicrobial stewardship program resides within the hospital's quality improvement and patient safety governance structure and is included within the hospital's quality and safety strategic plan. Bluebird's enhanced patient outcome management and advanced reporting capabilities positively impact patient outcomes.

Standardization

Data standardization such as consistent naming of organisms, standard definitions of MDR etc etc are essential in order to compare hospitals and facilitate national reporting. We also found that standardizing daily tasks (Systematic Standardized Workflow) performed by ICP's and IDPharms helped ensure quality and consistency nationally and assisted with professional education. A Systematic Standardized Workflow helps ensure that workload is balanced with available resources, thus helping prevent burn out (which, early on, was a major problem at several hospitals).

Best Possible Prescribing of Antibiotics

This is our core aim and is accomplished by ePrescribing (incorporates clinical decision support tools, the hospital formulary and guidelines as well as restriction of antibiotics) and prospective audit with tight feedback to prescribers - which aims to educate and thereby improve long term antimicrobial prescribing.

Organised Information

Bluebird's Ward Whiteboard and User Specific Dashboards optimise individual patient care. Relevant patient information (Vitals, Labs, Allergies, Postoperative Day, Device Day...) is organised and instantly available and ... the attending doctor has remote access. Infection control policy and protocols are immediately available as well as hospital specific antimicrobial prescribing guidelines.

Systems Designed To Prevent Error

Automating data capture eliminates transcription errors (e.g. capturing lab sensitivities). ePrescribing guides correct dosing and frequency. The prospective real time audit by the pharmacist addresses many potential medication errors. The IT system itself is designed to trap many data entry errors at source (for example an OR date in the future)

Reduce a Mountain of Work

Automatically entering all organisms isolated in the hospital together with their sensitivities and then directing ICP's to those patients where comprehensive assessment is required, dramatically reduces workload and helps ensure that the essential work that is done professionally.

Eliminate Low Impact Clerical Actions

Wherever possible information previously captured is auto entered so that professionals can leave the Data Capture Cave and get onto the wards. Isolates and their sensitivities, already documented in the lab IT systems automatically appear in Bluebird. Bed movement, captured in the HIS automatically updates Bluebird and antibiotics dispensed by the pharmacy IT system, automatically appear in Bluebird ...

Local Accountability

Because the support and collaboration of hospital management is essential to the success of infection control and antimicrobial stewardship teams, clear lines of accountability to the hospital manager are defined. Bluebird facilitates the creation of a review process where a senior manager monitors the progress with process measures such as the closing of alerts. We recommend that this happens regularly and non-compliance is addressed through a line management process. For example, reporting these numbers on a monthly basis to the Exco which then address non-compliance directly with Hospital General Manager through their Regional Directors. In this manner, Bluebird facilitates accountability and short interval control where previous solutions tended to be annual retrospective measures with too long an interval to close the loop.

Manage Risk

In the era of pay for performance, hospitals are being increasingly penalised for failing to manage healthcare associated infections and inappropriate antimicrobial usage. Care bundles are perhaps the holy grail of infectious risk management in hospital but merely one of the many powerful tools Bluebird provides to ameliorate risk.

Integration into the Clinical Workflow

Bluebird is designed to improve the clinical workflow. Experience has shown us that this is the most important aspect of the change management process. Bluebird unlocks opportunity, but this is only maximised if sufficient attention is paid to teaching personnel to use Bluebird as part of a new, standardised, organisation wide, workflow.

Institution-specific IT programming

Bluebird eliminates the need for Institution-specific IT programming which has long been a major hurdle to the adoption of electronic antimicrobial stewardship programmes. Not only has the standardisation of AMS decimated cost and accelerated implementation, perhaps even more importantly, it has opened the door to standardized national reporting.

Another reason why Bluebird is "The Path of Least Resistance".

Scalability

Bluebird has been specifically designed to measure, and then match available resources, with the ideal infection prevention and antibiotic stewardship program for that institution. This flexibility enables all facilities to engage in a way that's meaningful for them http://ow.ly/JukSA

Principles Improve Care, Reduce Costs, Manage Risk